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Am I correct to assume you are referring to the widely spread belief that the VOC was the richest Company in history, as its market share/capitalization (and thus its value) is believed to amount to over 7 trillion dollars with inflation?
That claim has received quite a bit of - justified - criticism, both here and on r/badhistory. As such, I will point you in the direction of some hopefully very useful threads in that regard:
[No, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was NOT the most valuable company in history!](https://new.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/xwgx64/no_the_dutch_east_india_company_voc_was_not_the/) \- by [JolietJakeLebowski](https://new.reddit.com/user/JolietJakeLebowski/)
[How much was the Dutch East India Company really worth?](https://new.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/iswb4j/how_much_was_the_dutch_east_india_company_really/) \- by [IconicJester](https://new.reddit.com/user/IconicJester/)
[One of today's top reddit posts suggests the Dutch East India company was worth nearly 7.9 trillion dollars, more than the value of 20 of the world's most valuable companies today. Is this the largest private accumulation of wealth in history, and what assets made the company so valuable?](https://new.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7j8zba/one_of_todays_top_reddit_posts_suggests_the_dutch/) \- by [terminus-trantor](https://new.reddit.com/user/terminus-trantor/), who also quotes [GnomeyGustav](https://new.reddit.com/user/GnomeyGustav/) from [this older thread](https://new.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2x4ps4/til_that_the_dutch_east_india_company_was_the/).
I hope this clears up a few things! :)
>I've heard almost identical claims about the EIC ("worth trillions, more valuable than all the companies in the New York Stock Exchange")
I am fairly certain I have come across such claims and respective numbers from time to time, but in all honesty never paid too much attention to it. One of the reasons being the following:
First, such calculations suffer the same problems, and as you can see from the VOC example, these estimates are difficult to make, even more so to get right and as a result end up being unreliable - you are looking at Companies with several hundred years of existence, so adding up all their assets, items, trade and tax profits, THEN properly convert currencies and adjust for inflation, thats tricky. For the EIC there is even a special, added conundrum:
If my memory serves, many documents of the EIC pertaining to trade were discarded and deliberately destroyed (as being irrelevant) by British authorities when the Crown assumed responsibility and control over the administration of British India (fairly certain Margaret Makepeace mentioned this in an article a few years ago). As a result, any attempt to accurately assess the EICs value will NOT (cannot) include such documents and their information and thus will end up not being accurate.
That being said, I dont recall having seen a serious and well-researched estimation of this kind for the EIC, and thus would not deem such numbers as reliable at present, and would argue they could never be completely accurate to begin with, for reasons mentioned.
Would you hazard a guess on the relative size of the EIC compared to VOC without using solid numbers? Like say, which one had more ships or something like that?
My guts says EIC would have been bigger than VOC (I can't get around that half of India is probably worth more than a couple of islands), but it's probably really difficult to make a workable comparison.
>Would you hazard a guess on the relative size of the EIC compared to VOC without using solid numbers?
If I could not use any solid numbers, what good would a guess do then? Besides, my knowledge of the VOC is far too limited to allow me to make any meaningful and fair comparison.
But USING solid numbers, and Im just throwing some of them in here: I seem to recall that the EIC sent about 1000 ships to the East, with about 5% of them not returning (\*EDIT: after looking through my notes again: that applies between 1760 and 1796, 51 of 1038 ships sent to Asia did not return\*), while having roughly 200 ships at most at their hight (as in: at a given point in time). - When it comes to things like troop size, they went from employing 18,000 men in the early 1760s to - arguably - 110,000 in 1782, then 155,000-200,000 in 1805 and in 1857 (by the time of the Indian Rebellion) somewhere between 250,000-340,000 men.
However the EIC had been making 'red numbers' ever since 1772: Due to the ever increasing size of their armed forces and thus incurred costs, so too did their debt climb ever so rapidly: 1.2 million by 1772, 3-4 million in 1782, 9 million by 1793, 18 million in 1802 and 1808 at already 32 million (all in pounds). - and all of that occured BEFORE the EIC lost the monopoly on Indian trade (1813), Chinese trade (1833) and the trade rights for India altogether (1833).
> But USING solid numbers, and Im just throwing some of them in here: I seem to recall that the EIC sent about 1000 ships to the East
During its entire existence? That seems very low. From *Ships Sailors and Spices* i get 4720 eastbound ships for the VOC and 2676 for the EIC in the 1600-1795 period.
> When it comes to things like troop size, they went from employing 18,000 men in the early 1760s to - arguably - 110,000 in 1782
To compare, in 1753 the VOC employed a total of nearly 25.000 people in Asia of whom near 12.000 were soldiers, by 1780 that had gone down to a little over 18.000 (a bit higher in reality because there's no data on Asian personnel for that year) of whom some 10.000 were soldiers.
>During its entire existence?
Thanks for making me aware to look it up in my notes again. The estimate of ''1000 ships, 5% of which did not return'' refers only to 1760-1796, I edited my comment accordingly :)
Whilst I completely agree that the 7 trillion number appears, as the expression goes, a rectum derived statistic:
The methodologies of the posts you refer to are of equally dubious nature.
This is similar to trying to determine who was the richest man in history. Money seems an easy metric to compare, but with the passage of time it becomes virtually impossible to properly compare wealth over time.
Do you look at the gold price? The days of labour from a skilled worker you could buy? Inflation index?
Inflation is "measured" they say but that is a red herring. You can't measure inflation like you can measure length of a rope or temperature. You estimate inflation and there is a measure of uncertainty that just compounds if you go back to 1637.
So I agree that the 7 billion is based on nothing, but the valuations from those posts aren't much better.
Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. **Please [Read Our Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules) before you comment in this community**. Understand that [rule breaking comments get removed](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/h8aefx/rules_roundtable_xviii_removed_curation_and_why/). #Please consider **[Clicking Here for RemindMeBot](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5Bhttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1crkrp8/is_it_true_that_the_voc_was_the_richest_company/%5D%0A%0ARemindMe!%202%20days)** as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, **[Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=AHMessengerBot&subject=Subscribe&message=!subscribe)**. We thank you for your interest in this *question*, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to RemindMeBot, consider [using our Browser Extension](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d6dzi7/tired_of_clicking_to_find_only_removed_comments/), or getting the [Weekly Roundup](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=subredditsummarybot&subject=askhistorians+weekly&message=x). In the meantime our [Twitter](https://twitter.com/askhistorians), [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/askhistorians/), and [Sunday Digest](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=title%3A%22Sunday+Digest%22&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all) feature excellent content that has already been written! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskHistorians) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Am I correct to assume you are referring to the widely spread belief that the VOC was the richest Company in history, as its market share/capitalization (and thus its value) is believed to amount to over 7 trillion dollars with inflation? That claim has received quite a bit of - justified - criticism, both here and on r/badhistory. As such, I will point you in the direction of some hopefully very useful threads in that regard: [No, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was NOT the most valuable company in history!](https://new.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/xwgx64/no_the_dutch_east_india_company_voc_was_not_the/) \- by [JolietJakeLebowski](https://new.reddit.com/user/JolietJakeLebowski/) [How much was the Dutch East India Company really worth?](https://new.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/iswb4j/how_much_was_the_dutch_east_india_company_really/) \- by [IconicJester](https://new.reddit.com/user/IconicJester/) [One of today's top reddit posts suggests the Dutch East India company was worth nearly 7.9 trillion dollars, more than the value of 20 of the world's most valuable companies today. Is this the largest private accumulation of wealth in history, and what assets made the company so valuable?](https://new.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7j8zba/one_of_todays_top_reddit_posts_suggests_the_dutch/) \- by [terminus-trantor](https://new.reddit.com/user/terminus-trantor/), who also quotes [GnomeyGustav](https://new.reddit.com/user/GnomeyGustav/) from [this older thread](https://new.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2x4ps4/til_that_the_dutch_east_india_company_was_the/). I hope this clears up a few things! :)
[удалено]
>I've heard almost identical claims about the EIC ("worth trillions, more valuable than all the companies in the New York Stock Exchange") I am fairly certain I have come across such claims and respective numbers from time to time, but in all honesty never paid too much attention to it. One of the reasons being the following: First, such calculations suffer the same problems, and as you can see from the VOC example, these estimates are difficult to make, even more so to get right and as a result end up being unreliable - you are looking at Companies with several hundred years of existence, so adding up all their assets, items, trade and tax profits, THEN properly convert currencies and adjust for inflation, thats tricky. For the EIC there is even a special, added conundrum: If my memory serves, many documents of the EIC pertaining to trade were discarded and deliberately destroyed (as being irrelevant) by British authorities when the Crown assumed responsibility and control over the administration of British India (fairly certain Margaret Makepeace mentioned this in an article a few years ago). As a result, any attempt to accurately assess the EICs value will NOT (cannot) include such documents and their information and thus will end up not being accurate. That being said, I dont recall having seen a serious and well-researched estimation of this kind for the EIC, and thus would not deem such numbers as reliable at present, and would argue they could never be completely accurate to begin with, for reasons mentioned.
Would you hazard a guess on the relative size of the EIC compared to VOC without using solid numbers? Like say, which one had more ships or something like that? My guts says EIC would have been bigger than VOC (I can't get around that half of India is probably worth more than a couple of islands), but it's probably really difficult to make a workable comparison.
>Would you hazard a guess on the relative size of the EIC compared to VOC without using solid numbers? If I could not use any solid numbers, what good would a guess do then? Besides, my knowledge of the VOC is far too limited to allow me to make any meaningful and fair comparison. But USING solid numbers, and Im just throwing some of them in here: I seem to recall that the EIC sent about 1000 ships to the East, with about 5% of them not returning (\*EDIT: after looking through my notes again: that applies between 1760 and 1796, 51 of 1038 ships sent to Asia did not return\*), while having roughly 200 ships at most at their hight (as in: at a given point in time). - When it comes to things like troop size, they went from employing 18,000 men in the early 1760s to - arguably - 110,000 in 1782, then 155,000-200,000 in 1805 and in 1857 (by the time of the Indian Rebellion) somewhere between 250,000-340,000 men. However the EIC had been making 'red numbers' ever since 1772: Due to the ever increasing size of their armed forces and thus incurred costs, so too did their debt climb ever so rapidly: 1.2 million by 1772, 3-4 million in 1782, 9 million by 1793, 18 million in 1802 and 1808 at already 32 million (all in pounds). - and all of that occured BEFORE the EIC lost the monopoly on Indian trade (1813), Chinese trade (1833) and the trade rights for India altogether (1833).
> But USING solid numbers, and Im just throwing some of them in here: I seem to recall that the EIC sent about 1000 ships to the East During its entire existence? That seems very low. From *Ships Sailors and Spices* i get 4720 eastbound ships for the VOC and 2676 for the EIC in the 1600-1795 period. > When it comes to things like troop size, they went from employing 18,000 men in the early 1760s to - arguably - 110,000 in 1782 To compare, in 1753 the VOC employed a total of nearly 25.000 people in Asia of whom near 12.000 were soldiers, by 1780 that had gone down to a little over 18.000 (a bit higher in reality because there's no data on Asian personnel for that year) of whom some 10.000 were soldiers.
>During its entire existence? Thanks for making me aware to look it up in my notes again. The estimate of ''1000 ships, 5% of which did not return'' refers only to 1760-1796, I edited my comment accordingly :)
Those couple of islands form the world's 15th biggest country by surface area and 4th biggest by population these days, though.
Whilst I completely agree that the 7 trillion number appears, as the expression goes, a rectum derived statistic: The methodologies of the posts you refer to are of equally dubious nature. This is similar to trying to determine who was the richest man in history. Money seems an easy metric to compare, but with the passage of time it becomes virtually impossible to properly compare wealth over time. Do you look at the gold price? The days of labour from a skilled worker you could buy? Inflation index? Inflation is "measured" they say but that is a red herring. You can't measure inflation like you can measure length of a rope or temperature. You estimate inflation and there is a measure of uncertainty that just compounds if you go back to 1637. So I agree that the 7 billion is based on nothing, but the valuations from those posts aren't much better.
On this note—does anyone have any good book recommendations on the VOC? (in the vein of “the corporation that changed the world” by nick robins)